While few people make a full-time income from blogging, many do make a decent secondary income from their blogs. However, in order to turn your blogging into a viable money maker, you will need to be dedicated to providing frequent updates, and it will also take quite some time before it starts to generate a reasonable level of revenue. This guide takes a look at the process of monetizing your blog.
When to Monetize Your Blog
Choosing when to monetize your blog can be a complicated decision, particularly since certain methods of advertising are likely to irritate your visitors. For this reason, many people monetize their blogs straight away by placing advertisements on the site as soon as they start publishing content. In other cases, bloggers prefer to leave it until they have already built up a larger readership, although this might not be the best idea if you have already given people the impression that your blogging is just a hobby with no intention to make any money out of it. Even if you choose not to join any affiliate programs or place any advertising on your website, be sure to give your readers the right impression from the very beginning. For example, if you are working on an e-book which you plan to sell once it’s finished, be sure to make the occasional reference to it. Provided that your website displays relevant advertisements and partakes in suitable affiliate programs, the backlash from your readers when you monetize your blog should be minimal.
What Are the Most Popular Ways to Make Money from Blogging?
The first thing which most people do when they monetize their blogs is to join an advertising program. By far the most popular one in the world today is Google AdSense, a free service which webmasters use for displaying contextual ads on their websites. This pay-per-click advertising program requires you to have a free Google account, as well as your own domain and website. It will take a few days for your account to be verified after which you will be provided with your AdSense code. This code may then be pasted into your website for displaying advertisements which are chosen based on the contents of the page they are displayed on. You will earn a small amount of money every time someone clicks on one of the advertisements on your website. You may also prefer to sell ad space on your blog directly to advertisers, and there are various services, such as buysellads.com which facilitate this.
Affiliate advertising is what generally makes the greatest amount of money for bloggers and other website owners. With any affiliate program, you will basically take a percentage of the sale price when someone buys an affiliate’s product or service having found out about it from your website. Some of the most popular affiliate advertising programs are Amazon Associates and Commission Junction. Such services are free to use.
Another way to make money from your blog is to sell your own merchandise through it. There are various online services which make it easy for bloggers to build their own online stores. WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform, also has an extremely popular free plugin called WooCommerce which allows people to easily sell products and services from their blogs. If you don’t know what to sell, perhaps you should consider writing an e-book which greatly expands on your niche and provides an in-depth guide or look into a specific subject.
Other Ways to Make Money from Blogging
While displaying advertisements in one form or another on your blog is by far the easiest and most popular way to monetize it, there are some other ways to turn your blog into a business:
. If you are a freelance writer, you can use your blog to showcase your best work and seek out new clients.
. Some companies will pay you to write reviews or guides relating to certain products or services which they sell.
. You can use your blog as a platform to advertise guest posting services in which case other bloggers may hire you to write for them as well.
. Finally, asking for donations might not make much money, but it costs nothing to place a PayPal donation button on your website.